The 14-year-old son of a friend of ours – a straight-arrow kid who attends a prestigious private school – was out jogging around Green Lake this evening when he was “detained” by SPD for, well, being out jogging. He didn’t have any ID on him (he’s a 14-year-old out jogging, fer crissakes), but at least he knew “how to behave” – yes sir, no sir, etc. His mother had to leave a school function to go get him.

Did I mention his father is black?

This is the sort of incident that doesn’t show up on statistics; and if it happened to this kid, you can bet it happens a lot. Why? Because all the controversy over how SPD treats communities of color, the DoJ report, the consent decree, new monitoring provisions, all of it, has not filtered down to the officer in the field. At all. And that’s the responsibility of SPD leadership and City Hall – starting with Mayor Mike McGinn – officials who have loudly denied any problems with SPD policing and who have fought accountability and reform, tooth and nail, for years. The egregious incidents – the ones that make the papers – may cost the city money, but they’re applauded outside the public eye by a lot of the rank and file as well as by SPD leadership. They set the tone, and this is the sort of thing that results.

Our friend’s son is OK now. But when his mother – who is a bit sheltered about these things but tonight is understandably spitting mad – asked him what he needed to do, he had a succinct answer:

“Be white.”

Ladies and gentlemen, your Seattle Police Department.

It’s a staple of the mudslinging in comment threads at various political blogs, in response to right-wing trolls, to wonder who’s paying them. Now, thanks to an article in today’s Guardian UK, we know at least one of the answers: We are.

The US military is developing software that will let it secretly manipulate social media sites such as Facebook and Twitter by using fake online personas to influence internet conversations and spread pro-American propaganda.

A Californian corporation has been awarded a contract with United States Central Command (Centcom), which oversees US armed operations in the Middle East and Central Asia, to develop what is described as an “online persona management service” that will allow one US serviceman or woman to control up to 10 separate identities based all over the world….

The discovery that the US military is developing false online personalities – known to users of social media as “sock puppets” – could also encourage other governments, private companies and non-government organisations to do the same.

The Centcom contract stipulates that each fake online persona must have a convincing background, history and supporting details, and that up to 50 US-based controllers should be able to operate false identities from their workstations “without fear of being discovered by sophisticated adversaries”.

Three thoughts. First, this report is that the US military is seeking to develop software that would at least partially automate what can easily be done at most any Web site or Facebook or Twitter account by hand. It’s therefore reasonable to assume that the US military (along with how many other government agencies?) is already doing this, just not as efficiently as the new software would allow.

Secondly, the US government is prohibited by law from propagandizing US citizens (insert laugh track here), and since online communities have no international borders, even if they’re based overseas, that’s exactly what these efforts would do. This is not just a breach of online etiquette. It’s a crime.

Third: why, oh why, does it always seem to be a British or other foreign media outlet that first reports these stories? I’m just sayin’…

No. Really. This time he has. About an hour ago, Egypt’s new vice president appeared on state television and announced that Mubarak is out, and power temporarily resides with the Supreme Council of Egypt’s armed forces. This after millions of people poured into Egypt’s streets today.

There are a lot of questions moving forward, of course. But for the moment, there are wild celebrations in Egypt, and a spring in the step of freedom-loving people around the world.

UPDATE 1:15 PM

Never mind. Mubarak offered a few new concessions, but, in the words of Al Jazeera English, “made it clear that he wasn’t going anywhere.”

As any student of politics knows, this won’t end anything. Basic political science is that revolutions are most likely to happen not when an oppressed people are at their most desperate, but when they have hope and that hope is denied. True to form, the masses now gathering in Tahrir Square and elsewhere (at nearly midnight local time) are staggeringly angry.

To be continued…

= = =

Numerous outlets are now reporting that in an address to his country in the next few hours, Hosni Mubarak will step down as Egypt’s president, handing power over to (depending on the report) either his newly anointed vice president or the military.

If true, the question, of course, is where Egypt goes from here. But for the time being, this is a remarkable victory for people power. A leaderless, youth-dominated movement, without initiating any violence, has removed from power a brutal dictator of three decades, backed by billions of dollars in military aid from the most powerful country in the world. Can’t have a much more powerful expression of democracy than that.

Okay, I have to ask: do any teenage girls get their fashion advice from Seattle Times editorials?

Once you realize that you’re not reading the Onion and that Sally Quinn – who gained her prestigious Washington Post column by having an affair with a married Ben Bradlee – is being completely serious, you’ll know everything you need to about why left and right alike despise the Washington elite, why our serious national concerns never seem to get solved, and why daily newspaper circulation is plummeting. It’s all there.

This won’t be as polished a response as I’d like, because, frankly, it’s a holiday, I’ve got better things to do, and Joel Connelly’s column yesterday — Seattle’s WTO riots were loud — and ineffective — is so inaccurate, idiotic, and simply factually wrong that it demands some sort of response. Not because anybody much reads seattlepi.com these days, but because, with a series of local events over the next several days commemorating the 10th anniversary of the anti-WTO protests (full disclosure: I’m one of the many organizers), we’re going to be hearing this meme a lot in the next week from local civic opinion leaders whose only real takeaway from the protests was that they gave Seattle a bad name for a while at certain cocktail parties they favored.

Technically, of course, Joel is correct — the “riots” were loud and ineffective. Except that the only people who “rioted,” in the sense of inciting violence, were a few dozen self-proclaimed “anarchists” (really, nihilists) who broke some windows, and law enforcement that spent four days trying to clear the streets by indiscriminately attacking protesters and bystanders alike — everyone, really, except the vandals. That was loud. But the 40,000 peaceful labor marchers (which Connelly acknowledges) and the separately organized, 20,000 or so peaceful people blockading downtown streets (which Connelly ignores) on November 30, 1999 made their point and changed history. The police riot was also ineffective; it didn’t stop the 1999 protests from being the most effective US street protest in at least a generation. Instead, it amplified the protesters’ message, by astonishing people around the world that American citizens would be so willing to take a stand against a neoliberal agenda that they’d provoke, and withstand, that kind of a state response.

You want an ineffective protest? Fifty thousand people marched in Seattle on February 15, 2003, against an imminent US invasion of Iraq. That was ineffective. As are most such marches. But WTO was different, and Connelly couldn’t be more wrong when he writes:

Left activists have scheduled panels to celebrate the 10th anniversary. They will doubtless dance around a basic question: What, if anything, did all the chaos accomplish?

Those panels — at a conference this weekend at Seattle University — will be more focused on the future than the past. But, no dancing:

Fact: Economic elites were looking to the 1999 WTO Seattle ministerial to vastly expand the neoliberal agenda of removal of trade barriers, labor and environmental protections, and global financial regulation (a plank called the “Multilateral Agreement on Investments). Local poobahs like Pat Davis dreamed that the whole package would be known worldwide as the “Seattle Round.”

Fact: Those negotiations failed because African and other global South delegates walked out toward the end of the week, angered that the proposals represented another attempt by the global haves to steal from the have-nots, and, they said, inspired by the actions of the people on Seattle’s streets.

Fact: The global reputation of the WTO, and the facade that such organizations had any sort of broad public support, was shattered by the Seattle demonstrations, which in turn helped catalyze an already existing, vibrant opposition worldwide. The WTO never recovered. Throughout subsequent ministerials in Qatar, Cancun, and Hong Kong — three militarized islands beseiged by demonstrators — the WTO has become a ghost of its former self. The proposals brought to Seattle, and subsequent attempts to expand multilateral neoliberal instruments, have never been enacted.

Fact: If those Seattle proposals had been enacted, the past year’s global economic meltdown, triggered mostly by the unilateral deregulation of US (and to a lesser extent European) markets, would have been far, far, far worse — a global economic catastrophe that would have particularly hammered the world’s poor. As it was, because most global South markets weren’t deregulated as the “Seattle Round” would have had it, those economies were mostly spared the brunt of the meltdown (excepting a spike in food prices caused by commodities deregulation in the North).

[As a side note, in the wake of Seattle, popularly elected governments in Latin America have largely rejected the neoliberal “Washington consensus” in the last decade — South America now represents only one percent of IMF debt, whereas it was once the bulk of it.]

In other words, there’s a fairly straight line between what Connelly sneers at as “chaos” of Seattle in 1999 and the prevention of a global depression in 2009. That chaos helped save thousands, if not millions, of lives.

It’s not bad for a week’s work. But not for Joel:

Seattle voters did unseat Mayor Schell. But WTO organizing committee co-chair, Seattle Port Commissioner-for-life Pat Davis, was twice reelected before (mercifully) retiring this year….

But nothing has stopped or really slowed conditions that the protesters were protesting.

The United States has continued to bleed manufacturing jobs. Some of those jobs go over the border to Mexico, where unchecked pollution — heavy metals, PCBs, etc. –in the New River flows back over the border into California.

Human trafficking for child labor continues. Annual reports submitted by former Seattle Rep. John Miller, who became State Department ambassador under President Bush, are harrowing.
China, Indonesia and Brazil have demonstrated the ugly side of economic development.

China has doubled its emissions and recently passed the U.S. as the world’s greatest emitter of greenhouse gases. Indonesia and Brazil have risen to third and fourth place respectively. The two countries account for more than 60 percent of today’s world deforestation, clearing and burning tropical forests that are the earth’s lungs.

Well, shit, all that is true. And the Seattle protests didn’t cure cancer, either. Economic policy is only now, and only fitfully, catching up to the notion that unchecked corporate greed is not an inherent good, and in fact could kill us all (c.f. climate change).

But no protest organizers were planning, or even dreaming, of solving all those problems. The goal was to flag these policies, then (but not now) broadly supported by elected Democrats and Republicans alike, as contested terrain. The organizers actually accomplished far more – and far more than any other similar US protest I’m aware of in the last 40 years (at least). And in the wake of what we’ve seen in the last ten years, and especially the last year, it’s pretty hard any more to argue the basic point of the protesters, that radical deregulation was dangerous and wrong.

But since some teenagers were rowdy, and a few windows got broken (to be replaced three days later), and Seattle’s reputation as a World Class City ™ was besmirched, don’t expect any local civic or media leaders to give credit where rightfully due this week, just as they didn’t in 1999. They were wrong. We were right, and a lot of people (mostly in other countries) are alive today because we took to the streets in 1999.

Connelly has one thing right:

Someday, a band of moderates should march from Seattle Central Community College down to Westlake Mall, chanting as they go: “Hey, hey, Ho, ho, futile protest has to go.”

I don’t share Joel’s lifelong fetish for political “moderates” (whatever the hell that means), but I am really tired of futile protests. He just picked the worst possible example.

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…Wasn’t just the bad air quality in last week’s record heat wave. No, think hotter. It’s election season, and while Goldy might not make endorsements each time out, I do.

From a progressive standpoint, most of the races and issues on the ballot this time are pretty clear choices. Here are my preferences in the races that will be decided this time: Constantine for King County Council; Holland and Vekich for Port Commission; Bloom, Licata, and Miller for Seattle City Council; Bass and Mas for Seattle School Board; Yes on the bag fee.

That leaves the extremely problematic race for mayor of Seattle.

Oy. For four years, ever since the debacle known locally as the Al Runte Disaster, I’ve been clamoring for someone to run against our vile would-be Mayor-for-Life, Greg Nickels. Now, I stand before you, abashed, in the realization that I wasn’t nearly specific enough. What I meant was that I want someone good to run against Hizzoner.

Remarkably, despite Nickels’ huge war chest, and his long record of at all costs (to taxpayers) of offering fellatio to the city’s biggest developers and businesses, seven mayoral challengers have filed this year. Five of them–Mike McGinn, James Donaldson, Joe Mallahan, Jan Drago, and Norman Sigler–have raised significant money. And none look likely to be a significant improvement on Nickels. In fact, the biggest names of the bunch, veteran city council member Jan Drago and former local basketball star James Donaldson, are if anything to the right of Nickels. Drago is a former committee chair for the big-business Downtown Seattle Association, and has faithfully served their interests on council; Donaldson is running on an I-Ran-A-Business-So-I-Know-Everything, anti-tax platform, and has hired reactionary former Monorail Board member Cindi Laws (last publicly noted for a notorious anti-Semitic outburst) as a campaign consultant. Oy. Sigler hasn’t been heard from much at all.

That leaves McGinn and Mallahan as the best hopes for a strategic vote to avoid a horrid Nickels/Drago general election. McGinn is a former local Sierra Club head, tapping the enviro crowd and running as, remarkably, the only one of the eight candidates to oppose Nickels’ epic Big Bore budgetary tunnel disaster. Unfortunately, McGinn is also running a demogogic campaign against Seattle public schools–he wants the city to take over the school system, a “solution” that’s been disastrous everywhere it’s been tried–and in every respect other than the tunnel is perfectly aligned with Nickels’ “it combats sprawl!” developer-friendly war on neighborhoods, the poor, and civic livability. The main difference is that when Nickels’ environmental “agenda” is in conflict with his need to please big money, as with the tunnel and waterfront development, the money will always win. McGinn’s a true enviro believer (and, by accounts, an arrogant one). But that, as Nickels has shown, fits quite nicely with the developer worship routine about 95 percent of the time. Five percent is not much of an improvement.

In comparison with Mallahan, McGinn’s opposition to the tunnel is a plus, but more than outweighed by his cheap school-bashing and his more enthusiastic embrace of Nickels’ War on the Neighborhoods. And so, until recently, I’ve been, somewhat lamely, suggesting a strategic vote for Joe Mallahan — as a corporate cipher with more of an upside than Mike McGinn — in the hopes that he can stop the train wreck of a Drago/Nickels finale. But it’s a weak pick, the (seemingly) least bad of a bad set of options.

But then, as I was talking with some friends about this conundrum, we suddenly realized: Why settle for, say, a protest vote nobody has heard of (that would be Elizabeth Campbell), when you can go with one everyone is familiar with? Why settle for the least bad of the major candidates? Why go with the devil you don’t know (Mallahan), when we can have the devil we all know?

That’s right. The ideal mayoral candidate in 2009 goes by many names: Beezlebub, The Devil, Price of Darkness. But so as to make sure all his votes are counted properly, I’m suggesting we settle on one.

Satan for Mayor!

Now, granted, Mayor of Seattle is a bit of a comedown for Satan. Until recently, after all, he was Vice President of the United States. But that’s just it. He was also, at the same time, Prime Minister of North Korea, President of Haiti, a warlord in Somalia, plus attending to some serial killings in Kansas for yucks and grins. Satan’s a busy guy, but he’s also a detail guy. We certainly wouldn’t have to worry about missing snowplows again.

(Too hot for that.)

Satan, like all the other major candidates, cares about jobs, yes, but cares about the environment, too. (He was immersed in global warming issues before Seattle even existed.) He’s also uniquely qualified to oversee the seemingly inevitable downtown tunnel. And who better to ensure that Seattle is truly a world class city? (Not to mention a city that’s lost its soul…)

Give in to temptation. When you mail in your ballot this primary season, write in one name, the only name, for Mayor of Seattle.

Satan.

Because Seattle is at a Crossroads.

It’s sunrise in Iran, and whatever the coming day brings is likely to be both inspiring and ugly.

Monday’s march in Tehran is reported by ABC (via HuffPo) to have been five miles long. Another is scheduled for today, as well as a general strike, amidst numerous reports of dissension among some ruling hardline clerics and countless smaller protests. Some miscellany:

* The violence could have been, and may still become, much worse. And we know very little about what’s happening in cities and towns outside Tehran, 19 of whom were also set to have Monday demonstrations.

* Almost all of our knowledge is coming via Twitter. (#iranelection is the go-to feed.) Iranians are beating the censors — who’ve shut down cell phone operation as well as Internet access — by phoning out of the country to proxies who are tweeting for them. And you, yes, you, can help: go here to find out how to become a proxy.

* Lest you think this phenomenon is an accident, the Mousavi campaign has been promoting the slogan “One person = one broadcaster.” And the international connections thus made are themselves a major, unprecedented phenomenon likely to have important political and cultural consequences.

* American media on this has been just dreadful, when it’s cared at all. A lot of print media today had a tone similar to this appalling NYT “news analysis” that treated the election as a done deal and the protests as essentially irrelevant. (They don’t involve official spokespeople, you know.) To repeat: these protests are no longer about the elections. They’re about the legitimacy of the regime. It scarcely matters whether the reported election result was accurate or not; millions of Iranians don’t think so and have had enough. That’s what matters.

Meanwhile, I heard an ABC Radio “national newscast” this afternoon (on KOMO-AM, Seattle’s self-billed only all-news radio station) that, just before the end of the newscast, devoted one sentence and about five seconds to a story that is riveting the world concerning a country the U.S. has major foreign policy issues with. And CNN’s Larry King, always with his finger on the pulse, devoted his show tonight to….American Idol.

* The always-astute BooMan makes a useful point:

The 1979 revolution in Iran took over a year to unfold….each clash with protesters that resulted in fatalities led to new more impassioned protests as people gathered for funerals and memorials. It’s often said that the revolution advanced in 40-day stages, as forty days is the traditional period of mourning in Iran’s culture. Americans are not accustomed to such slow-motion revolution with massive (over month-long) pauses. Add to this, the new 24-hour news environment, and this feature of Iran’s political and religious tradition should solidly flummox most analysts….Even if things calm down and appear to settle out over the next few weeks, forty days from now you could see a seemingly spontaneous re-eruption of street protests….This attempt at revolution cannot be considered as over until we seem calm sustained for a very long time.

At 4 PM Monday Iran time (or, about when it gets light here), anti-regime marches have been called in 20 Iranian cities. This is to be followed by a general strike Tuesday. The main flow of information out of Iran right now is not coming through traditional media — and especially not U.S. media — but via Twitter. Check the #iranelection Twitter feed for continuous updates. Stateside, the blog of the National Iranian-American Council has also been a good source.

Expect hundreds of thousands, if not millions, in the streets Monday. And expect crackdowns. The regime is in a hard place. They can’t give quarter to the protesters, but they also don’t want to create martyrs; the escalation of protests since Friday is very similar to the arc that brought down the Shah in 1979. This is already no longer about a disputed election, but about the legitimacy of the rule of the mullahs.

It’s also worth noting that Iran’s 2005 general presidential election was similarly suspect. Ahmadinejad was expected to finish third out of the four leading candidates, but slipped into second under dubious conditions, and then won the runoff. Is it any wonder the fundamentalists thought they could get away with fraud again this time? (After all, it worked even better for fundamentalists in Ohio in 2004 than it did in Florida in 2000…)

And speaking of American neo-cons, spiritual cousins to Ahmadinejad’s patrons, how despicable is it that the emerging narrative on wingnut sites seems to be that this stolen election is wonderful news, because it ruins Obama’s overtures and makes it more likely that Israel or even the US will launch military attacks on Iran? Rather than support the people in the streets in dozens of Iranian cities, demanding freedom and democracy, our wingnut friends want first to abandon them to Revolutionary Guard thugs (whose acts of violent suppression they’re clearly rooting for), then to bomb them. These cretins sure know how to win friends and influence people.

I usually don’t give much thought to the spam that makes it through my filter, and most of it is also boring and predictable (whoever knew there were so many dead people with unclaimed millions running around Africa and Asia?). But one that popped in today, sent with malicious intent and undoubtably toxic attachment by someone in the Eastern Hemisphere, is both pretty clever and unintentionally hilarious:

From: Delta Air Lines

Thanks for the purchase!

Booking number: 3LSMXK

You will find attached to this letter PASSENGER ITINERARY RECEIPT of your electronic ticket.
It verifies that you paid the ticket in full and confirms your right for air travel and luggage transportation by the indicated flight Delta Air Lines.

On board you will be offered:
– beverages;
– food;
– daily press.
You are guaranteed top-quality services and attention on the part of our benevolent personnel.

We recommend you to print PASSENGER ITINERARY RECEIPT and take it alone to the airport. It will help you to pass control and registration procedures faster.

See you on board!
Best regards,

Delta Air Lines

Aside from the telltale misuses of American English (“daily press,” “control and registration procedures”), it’s pretty clear the author is not only not a Delta employee, but has never experienced domestic American air travel (and probably can’t even imagine it). I mean, really: Food? Top-quality services? Benevolent personnel?

I love snow. I always have. And it’s snowing. Again. It’s beautiful. I should be thrilled.

Instead, I’m just pissed off. We live on a hill, in Fremont, that’s been a skating rink for nearly a week now. I understand when side streets don’t get plowed during an emergency. But impassable for a week?

And it’s not just side streets. The nearest arterial is less than three blocks away. It’s flat. It connects to other streets that are flat (or, in one case, gently sloping). By all appearances, that street hasn’t been plowed, either. Or salted. Or even sanded. The bus, needless to say, doesn’t come.

Read some of the over 250 comments on Joel Connelly’s latest column and you’ll quickly deduce that this situation is happening all over the region, and especially in the cities of Seattle, Bellevue, and Redmond. And there’s no excuse. None.

“But Seattle has hills!” So does Pittsburgh. And Boston. And any number of other cities that get snow regularly. They cope. “But it’s rare here!” I’ve lived in any number of places in the South – Houston, Memphis, South Carolina, Virginia – where it snowed in amounts roughly comparable to Seattle: a couple times a year, maybe, and one big storm a decade. Some of these places have hills, too. They cope. Mind you, we’re talking the South, where local governments are loathe to tax or to provide any services, and where buses are something the black maids use to get to the suburbs each morning. They handle this shit better than Seattle. “Salt hurts the environment!” Once or twice a year? I can live with that. But then, I could live with sand on the roads, too, and I’m not seeing that, either. After seven fucking days.

It’s preposterous that in the 21st century, a metropolitan area of nearly four million people — one of the wealthiest metropolitan areas in the world, I might add — can be nearly paralyzed for a week or more by a few inches of snow.

Oh, speaking of the P-I, one other thought: we haven’t gotten home delivery of our newspaper since Friday, and, guess what? We haven’t missed it. Everything we need is online. Wonder how many other households will reach the same conclusion this week?

In 1969, when I was in fifth grade, my parents moved from the West Coast to Columbia, South Carolina. In their infinite wisdom, my parents decided that Columbia’s freshly desegregated public schools were no place for a nice white boy. Instead, they put me in one of the new white-only “Christian” private schools that had sprung up to cater to alarmed white parents.

My first week in class, I made an offhand remark to one of my new classmates that I didn’t understand what the difference was supposed to be between white people and black people — they were all just people. He immediately went to the teacher, who promptly had me stand before the entire class and repeat the comment – not to educate them, but to publicly humiliate me for my profound ignorance concerning the inferiority of n****rs.

We’re about to elect an African-American to become President of the United States.

In 1982, my new wife and I moved to Houston, Texas, where she wanted to go to graduate school. I was white, and she was not, a marital arrangement that until fairly recently had not been legal in Texas (or most other Southern states). In Houston, fourth largest city in the country, there were (and probably still are) places that would not serve us.

We’re about to elect an African-American to become President of the United States.

Seattle is different. But not very. In the late ’90s there was a rash of killings of unarmed black men by SPD, and the African-American community was in an uproar. The NAACP, Urban League, and other black moderates joined in the call for meaningful civilian review of police actions. I wrote columns for Seattle Weekly echoing that call. The explicitly racist letters that came in response should not have been surprising.

We’re about to elect an African-American to become President of the United States.

My memories are not remarkable; they’re snapshots of a reality tens of millions of people continue to experience in America each day. A colorblind society would be great. We’re not there yet. Like most of my African-American friends, I have a hard time believing this is happening; but I’m sure glad it is. Whatever one thinks of Obama’s policies — and as I noted yesterday, I’m not thrilled by them — this election will go a long way toward reestablishing America’s moral credibility in the eyes of the world. Race does matter, here and elsewhere. So does class. And Obama is correct to note that his inspiring, improbable story is only possible in America.

Unlike 2000 or 2004, this year I’m proud of the American electorate — and it has nothing to do with ideology.

Tonight, regardless of what’s going on in the other races you care about, take a moment to witness history. This is an election that will be taught in civics textbooks for a long, long time.

Remember early on in the campaign, when white pundits were fretting that Obama might not be “black enough” to attract the black vote? Non-white pundits knew better. Beyond being secure in the knowledge that Obama’s white opponents would make damned sure everyone was aware that Obama was The Other (as John McCain and Sarah Palin have predictably done), they also knew that if he got this far, his African-American support would be near-universal. Not because of his policies or the tactics of the McCains of the world, or even solidarity with Obama’s skin color, so much as the future possibilities for those voters’ children, and their skin color.

In the comment thread of another blog a couple of weeks ago, a commenter offered what I think captures the phenomenon of Obama’s (probable) triumph nicely:

Rosa sat, so Martin could march.
Martin marched, so Barack could run.
Barack ran, so our children could fly.

It’s a tough competition among Seattle’s daily papers, what with the Times’s Harvard hit piece on Darcy Burner and the P-I’s laughable front-page analysis today of early voting for governor (which is entirely pegged on extrapolating King County’s lower mail voting rate thus far than other counties without accounting for the fact that we’re also one of only two counties with polling place voting on Tuesday).

But the “honor” of worst smear jobs of this dismal campaign season in our local papers has to go to the P-I’s Joel Connelly for his relentless series of factually challenged hit pieces on I-1000, reprised today. (And no, it doesn’t deserve to be linked to. Find it yourself, if you have the stomach.)

Connelly has a right to his faith-based opinion on I-1000, and to express it. I would respect that. (Goodness knows, I’ve had enough public opinions that friends of mine have disagreed with over the years.)

However, he does not have a right to use his public soapbox for a seemingly endless litany of dishonest smear jobs. His jihad on this initiative (religious imagery intentional) has dramatically lowered my opinion of his integrity.

I’ve been terminally ill; I spent two long years sliding toward my death, including three separate comas, over two dozen surgeries, and untold nausea and pain. I was fortunate enough to survive it, but I sure remember the experience. With all the ameliorative care in the world, it was still awful, and now that I’m a couple decades older and more brittle, it will be worse next time. Maybe I’ll endure it again, maybe I won’t. That’s my choice. As someone personally affected by this initiative, I don’t simply disagree with Connelly; I find his work on this, his assumptions about the motivations and decision-making capacity of the terminally ill, his eagerness to impose his own religious and moral code on my body, and his willingness to put me and my family through a living end-of-life hell so that he can feel a little better to be personally offensive – and it takes a lot to offend me.

I’m no great fan of Barack Obama. His election will be historic, and he will provide both an inspiration and a desperately new face for America to the world. And he’s smart and competent. That said, he’s proven his corporate centrism on far too many issues (including, most recently, his enthusiastic backing of a $700 billion that I suspect we’ll soon come to widely acknowledge as a criminal looting of the treasury) for me to be much impressed. And Joe Biden, from his whoring for credit card companies to his war on drugs mania to his disastrous plan to partition Iraq, is a neat encapsulation of what is vile about many Senate Democrats.

But it doesn’t matter. In Washington state, our electoral votes are a foregone conclusion. The presidential race is strictly a spectator sport here. And, as Darryl has been demonstrating nightly, one with a pretty much foregone conclusion.

Similarly, I’m not all that worked up about this blog’s special obsession over the past two years, Burner/Reichert. Darcy would make a great Congressperson, and Reichert is a lousy one; I really hope she wins. But it’s not my district.

Where I (and most of us) will be most affected and can make a difference is in the race that concerns me most right now: the race for governor.

Four years ago, I did not support Christine Gregoire. I found Dino Rossi repellant, but after eight years of the execrable Gary Locke, I also had no love for yet another do-nothing centrist Democrat. I wound up voting for (and publicly endorsing) the Libertarian candidate, Ruth Bennett.

Once the election dust settled (without the help of my vote), though, a funny and very rare thing happened: I was won over by a politician who did a much, much better job than I expected.

Mind you, there’s still quite a bit I don’t agree with Christine Gregoire on. (And sorry, but if we can mock Sarah Palin’s faux-folksiness, I’m also not on board with the calculated effort to rebrand “Christine” as “Chris.”) In particular, Gregoire’s handling of the Alaskan Way Viaduct controversy has been both ham-fisted and wrong. But generally, Gregoire has been exactly what Locke was not: a leader who gets things done. She’s brought the legislature to the table and helped hammer out compromises on several key contentious issues. Her fiscal and executive management of the state, contrary to Rossi’s propaganda, has been exemplary. She balanced the budget, got voter-mandated education monies funded (unlike Locke, who simply ignored the voters); she used economic good times to invest in needed expenditures that had been slashed under Locke; and she also set aside money for the inevitable slow times that are now upon us. Does anyone doubt that, if elected, Rossi would have done none of this, electing instead — just like his party’s national leaders — to use the economic good times to simply give tax breaks to the wealthy?

Gregoire also deserves credit for respecting voters — not only by getting education funded, but also (much as it galls me) by pushing for enactment of Tim Eyman’s successful measures. The contrast couldn’t be clearer: Dino Rossi has shown time and again his contempt for voters, from his flagrant violation of campaign finance laws and his idiotic party label (“prefers GOP”) deception and his cynical effort to exploit Obama’s coattails to his fantastic (in the literal sense of the word) transportation plan to his consistent efforts to avoid fessing up to policy stances, especially on social issues, that are wildly out of step with this state’s electorate.

Even so, Rossi would not be making this race close if Gregoire’s story had been told effectively. Instead, she has proven herself in two campaigns now to be as bad a CEO for her campaign as she is good as a CEO for the state. Over the last 18 months I was repeatedly assured, by people who should know, that Gregoire’s people understood that they’d run a dreadful campaign in 2004, and that it would be fixed this time. Instead. Rossi — with an able assist from this state’s ever-pliant media — has skated by on his deceptions and a blizzard of negative ads that, until recently, have mostly gone unrefuted in any meaningful sense. Rossi has been allowed to define Gregoire and set the agenda for this campaign, an almost inconceivable feat given that Gregoire’s the incumbent. Even though Rossi is, if anything, even more repellant and dishonest than he was in 2004, Gregoire’s campaign incompetence could easily cost her the election, and us a very good governor.

But every poll shows this race within polling’s margin of error — which it certainly was in 2004 — and so even though many of us have already voted, this is one race where the next 24 hours could make all the difference. Get out the vote. Talk up the governor’s race among your friends, co-workers, relatives. Don’t let Dino Rossi’s dishonest and illegal campaigning carry the day. If it does, it not only establishes an awful precedent for how statewide campaigns are to be run, but it sets us up for a long four years in our state, years in which many people will needlessly suffer from Rossi’s budget priorities. And it will cost us the best governor we’ve had in ages.